Commercial Investment

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A key principle of the NBP is to support and stimulate commercial investment.

Since the publication of the NBP in 2012, the commercial telecommunications sector has invested over €2.75 billion. This was primarily on upgrading and modernising networks which support the provision of high speed broadband and mobile telecommunications services.

Significant additional investment is expected over the coming years. Today over 1.78m or 75% of premises in Ireland can access commercially available high speed broadband services.

Various players in the market have ramped up the speed of their rollout, for example:

SIRO is investing €450m to provide fibre broadband to 500,000 premises across 51 towns on an open access basis.In February 2019 it announced further investment in its high speed broadband deployment in Donegal.

Virgin, currently serving 900,000 premises, is investing high speed broadband rollout to a further 100,000 premises.

In February 2019 Imagine announced plans to invest €300 million a high speed broadband deployment across Ireland. The announcement follows on from an announcement in 2018 of a partnership with global asset management group Brookfield and €120m funding to roll out high speed broadband across underserved areas of the country.

In February 2019 eir announced that its new FTTH investment of up to €500m over a 5 year period, to upgrade eir's legacy copper network across 180 towns and cities. This is in addition to eir's deployment of high speed broadband to 300,000 rural premises under its Commitment Agreement with the Department.

According to information provided by eir to the Department, it plans to complete the vast majority of it's deployment of high speed broadband to 300,000 premises in mostly rural areas by the mid-year completion target, with the remaining premises to be completed soon afterwards. The Department is engaging with eir in this matter.

This commitment is on a fully commercial basis. The Commitment Agreement is available here.

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